Linfield grad lands one of the country’s top writing awards

Shane McCrae ’02 recently received a 2011 Whiting Writers’ Award. The prestigious $50,000 award, one of the most coveted prizes in the nation, recognizes 10 young writers for extraordinary talent and promise.

McCrae’s debut collection of poetry, Mule, “has the rhythms of the ocean,” said the Whiting selectors. “We follow him out to sea, and the poems become increasingly poignant the farther out you get. You find yourself washed up on a shoal where the words, like a rock, break your heart.”

His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2010, The American Poetry Review, Fence, jubilat, Gulf Coast, and other journals.

McCrae holds degrees from Linfield College, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Harvard Law School. He resides in Iowa City and is studying for a doctorate in English at the University of Iowa.